This week we featured research on humanitarian aid, predicting crises, trade, learning and more...
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Last week, I (Oliver) wrote about 'win-wins' in development, i.e. policies that benefit both recipients and implementers. Read about interventions where businesses and governments directly benefit from improving the welfare of others. And yesterday, I hosted a fantastic presentation by Farhan Abrol, Sam Carter and Han Sheng Chia who outlined how organisations in the development sector can evaluate potential applications of AI in their programmes. You can find the recording and slides here: AI for Good? Evaluating the Impact of AI in Development.
We have two other events coming in June, so if you haven't already, make sure to sign up for these webinars on impact investment in global education (June 23) and critical minerals and economic development in Africa (June 26).
Humanitarian aid systems are under mounting pressure, with key donors like the US and UK cutting funding despite growing needs. In new research on one of the world’s largest refugee camps, Vittorio Bruni and Olivier Sterck show that aid cuts and delays have dramatic impacts on food consumption, food insecurity, and overall welfare, while also straining local food and credit markets.
Around the world, humanitarian and development actors routinely scramble to respond to crises that could have been anticipated months in advance, especially food crises. Ananth Balashankar, Philipp Zimmer, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Samuel Fraiberger present evidence on a new AI-driven early warning system which uses news data to predict food crises up to 12 months in advance–enabling faster, proactive responses.
In Wednesday's article, Felipe Brugués, Ayumu Ken Kikkawa, Yuan Mei and Pablo Robles studied the impact of NAFTA in Mexico, finding that Mexican consumers benefited through lower prices, while Mexican producers benefited from larger profit margins due to lower input prices and higher markups.
While access to schooling has improved globally, learning outcomes remain shockingly poor—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Benjamin Piper, Director of Global Education at the Gates Foundation, discusses the persistence of the global learning crisis, its roots, the evidence-based solutions at hand, and why the time to act is now.
The most remote villages in Northern Tanzania pay 40–55% more for fertiliser than villages with better market access. Shilpa Aggarwal, Brian Giera, Dahyeon Jeong, Jonathan Robinson, and Alan Spearot demonstrate that halving travel costs leads to a nearly fourfold increase in fertiliser adoption.
As demand for heroin decreases in the US—driven by the growing dominance of synthetic opioids—drug cartels have pivoted to an unexpected but profitable venture: avocados. Itzel De Haro finds that this has increased violence directed at civilians, presenting policymakers with the challenge of designing strategies that not only address the production of illegal drugs but also consider the potential spillover effects on other industries.
In Colombia, Julian Arteaga, Nicolás de Roux, Margarita Gáfaro, and Heitor S. Pellegrina show that weather shocks induce a fragmentation of the farm-size distribution and exacerbate the prevalence of small farms in an economy, shedding light on how climate change might lower agricultural productivity in developing countries.
Political misinformation is increasingly becoming a problem worldwide, not only misleading but also furthering polarisation. John A. List, Lina M. Ramirez, Julia Seither, Jaime Unda, and Beatriz H. Vallejo offer a demand-side intervention to this problem—fostering critical thinking—which has resulted in meaningful shifts in behaviour.
The end of guerrilla violence in Colombia reshaped the composition of healthcare workers in conflict-affected areas. Claudio Mora-García, Mounu Prem, Paul Rodríguez-Lesmes, and Juan F. Vargas find that, despite redistributing healthcare workers away from these areas, they maintained service quality, offering valuable insights for public services in post-conflict settings.
Some opportunities in development advertised in the past week:
- The Center for Global Development are hiring a research fellow, help to build CGD’s new AI Initiative for Global Development.
- Paper submissions are now open for CSAE Conference 2026: Economic Development in Africa.
- Evidence Action has launched a search for a new CEO.
Elsewhere in development:
- Malnutrition’s Long Shadow Puts Children at Risk Today and in the Future - Eeshani Kandpal on CGDEV.
- Also on CGDEV, Patrick Stadler, Gabriel Hanrieder and Ian Mitchell ask: Can We Benchmark Development Agencies on Impact?
- David McKenzie has released his annual report on The State of Development Journals 2025: Quality, Acceptance Rates, Review Times, Open Access, and What’s New
- On VoxEU, the US-China trade war created jobs (elsewhere) by Tiago Cavalcanti, Pedro Ogeda and Emanuel Ornelas.
- GiveWell tried to reproduce the RCTs behind their top charities.
- Clare Donaldson, Lauren Gilbert and James Hu write about the end of lead on Works in Progress.
- Kevin Starr outlines why the development sector needs to design for what African governments can do and will pay for.
- On WWHGE, Haogen Yao, Noam Angrist, Sarah Lane Smith and Katerina Ananiadou discuss new data and evidence on climate-resilient education.
- Read the third post in J-PAL's Evidence Effect series on how LMIC governments drive and scale effective poverty reduction policies.
- New podcast: Hard Drugs is a show by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen about medical innovation.
- The Guardian view on Zambia’s Trumpian predicament: US aid cuts are dwarfed by a far bigger heist.
- Read about Peru’s rapid rise as the world’s leading blueberry exporter.
- Watch this Brookings Institution presentation on creating jobs and structural transformation in Africa.
- Also check out Ken Opalo's talk about the economics and politics of the social contract in Africa to the World Banks CEOG network.
- I enjoyed attending this ODI Global event on Europe's role in advancing Mission 300.